Harry Potter and the AI recruitment solution

Are AI recruitment tools seen by some as the equivalent of the sorting-hat in Harry Potter, magically picking the most suitable candidates?  Perhaps this explains why only 11% of HR professionals who responded to Freeths’ survey earlier this year said that they would trust AI to recruit the best candidates. Because who believes in magic?

Those using AI recruitment tools do not believe they are magic but do think that technology offers a way of making recruitment processes more effective and more efficient.

For those who are considering their use, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) last week published a report on consensual audits it had carried out with a range of developers and providers of AI recruitment tools.

The ICO recommended that before employers procure an AI recruitment tool, they ask themselves some key questions:

1. Have you completed a Data Protection Impact Assessment?
   • This should ideally be carried out at the procurement stage.
2. What is your lawful basis for processing personal information?
   • There must be a lawful basis for processing personal information and forms of sensitive special category information (eg racial, ethnic origin and health data) require additional specific conditions to be met.
3. Have you documented responsibilities and set clear processing instructions?
   • There should be a contract that sets out clearly who is the controller and who is the processor of personal information.
   • There should be clear written instructions to the AI provider on the processing of personal information.
4. Have you checked that the provider has mitigated bias?
   • Personal information must be processed fairly and tools that have inbuilt bias or, for example, allow recruiters to filter out candidates with certain protected characteristics will not be processing data fairly.
5. Is the AI tool being used transparently?
   • Candidates must be informed of how AI tools will process their personal information and how they can challenge automated decisions that are made about them.
6. How will you limit unnecessary processing?
   • The audits showed that some tools collected more personal information than was necessary and retained it indefinitely. AI tools, like employers, should collect only the minimum amount of personal information required to achieve their purposes.

We will discuss this ICO Guidance and other issues arising out of the increasing use of AI tools within HR at our webinar on 19 November 2024. Find out more details here.